I have often had the glorious opportunity to watch someone try to deploy a project by picking compiled libraries that they had thought had changed. Every time they deployed by using this method, their live project would not run. When they run their project on the development machine, it runs no problem. This confuses the developer to no end resulting in a multitude of profanities.
This is a bit painful to watch. I really do not understand why developers do not deploy by using installation packages or deployment methods provided by their development environment.
Today, I had offered to deploy the project for them and used the VisualStudio deployment utility. This was a web-based project so it was very easy. The deployment wizard walks you through the process starting at where you would like to deploy to. The deployment results in only deploying the files necessary to run the program or website. I had learned this principal while working for a London company; ICINITI.
ICINITI would use a packaging tool to deploy products to customer machines including websites. Their projects would often automate part of the process including site setup, run batch files and deploy other required files. Deployment to customer’s computer systems would go pretty quick. Sometimes it was so smooth the customer was able to conduct the deployments themselves.
Today’s deployment took about 5 minutes or less. I had later demonstrated how and what I had done. I believe this will be used a little more often as a deployment technique.
